The “Painting Is Dead” Versus “Painting Is Back” List

We’ve been debating painting’s death for centuries now, and it seems we can’t quit. In 1839 the late French painter Paul Delaroche first dared to say those fateful words “painting is dead.” But even now nobody can agree if it’s dead; painting’s been reborn more times than we can count, thanks to critics who declare that “painting is back.” Is there any point to this seesawing between “painting is dead” and “painting is back”? Well, I did some quick and easy Google research and came up with a brilliant conclusion: My head hurts.

You don’t need to do research to feel art pangs, but anyway, I did some research. First I chose a representative essay from each year which declared the status of painting as either “dead” or “back.” Those are listed below. (A Google search returns approximately 66,300 results for “painting is back” and 175,000 results for “painting is dead.”) Then I made a very unscientific chart of the two Google search terms, featured above. As you can see there’s some back-and-forth between blue (“painting is dead”) and red (“painting is back”), at least in terms of Google search popularity. Take that with a grain of salt.

Now there’s one important irony I dragged out from all this “painting is dead” versus “painting is back.” Art critics often bring up “painting is dead,” but only to say they don’t believe it. Howard Halle and Jerry Saltz for example, are both quite fond of talking about—and dismissing—the “painting is dead” line of thinking. Oddly, it’s hard to find articles where people actually believe that painting is dead. Nobody’s willing to go on the record saying it is finally, truly, and forever dead. Instead, we get an in-crowd of critics attempting to knock down a straw man that nobody really believes in.

2006 – “For all of the regular pronouncements of the ‘death of painting’ it just refuses to roll over and play dead. Painting as possum. Not dead but just pretending to be as it gathers strength for yet another resurrection.”

alternatives: “painting not dead, just old and tired and can’t find its slippers”; “painting is undead”; “we still haven’t settled ‘what is art?’ so the whole dead or back issue just needs to shut up and keep walking.”

Den Hickey

Painting is for Necrophiles.

charlesrkiss

Painting is only dead for those who lack creativity and imagination; and for whom will use “avant garde” materials and methods simply as crutches.

August, 2009: The Peak of the “Glorious Three Months” when Nobody Cared.

Ben Steven Kosak Laden

Without painting there’d be nothing for rich people to put in their dining/living rooms. Maybe retro movie posters, but they don’t cost enough. No only paintings are expensive enough to be appropriate.

Art

The reason that I think painting is “dead” is because in the last 40 years or so, there hasn’t been a movement that has delivered anything new and exciting to the evolution of art. Since abstraction, pop art and minimalism, all I see are rehashes of past styles and concepts. Painting is an exhausted medium. There’s really no way to open peoples’ eyes anymore with paints and brushes. In fact, now, the act of painting itself seems rather quaint and anachronistic in our 21st century digital world.